Help reading a .wps file?

Question

A student has e-mailed me her final paper and I cannot open it.  I've had situations like this in the past.  The paper has the .wps extension for Microsoft Works.  I have Microsoft Works 2000, but it claims the file is corrupted and won't open it.  (It is not corrupted -- works files from others have done this to me before, and I have no idea why!)  I've tried downloading the available converters for Microsoft Word, the software I primarily use, but none of them will work either.  The program claims the appropriate converter is not installed, tries to install it, then asks me for the original installation disks.  I provide the original disks, but then the program claims the needed installation files are not on the disks!

Can anyone offer any help?  I cannot get in touch with this student and I need to grade her paper!

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I will assume you have verified that the file is not infected with a virus, your anti-virus software is running and has up to date definitions.

One issue that causes strange behavior like this is the normal.dot file being corrupt. That's your default blank document template file. You can try renaming the normal.dot file to normal.bad then opening Word and trying again. 

I don't know about the problem you're having with the converter apps.

I'd suggest using Open Office, but that wouldn't help with wps files since microsoft has kept the formatting of Works files proprietary and changed it so many times. You'd still have to convert the wps file to something else to bring it into Open Office, unless you import it as something like text-only. 

If all else fails, you may be able to get the text without formatting by opening the file with wordpad or notepad.

To curtail this problem in the future you might want to have your students save and submit their files in a standard format such as rtf.

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Help reading a .wps file?

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